Articles

A Certain Gorgeous BleaknessBy James Cassellon May 4, 2018The Gay and Lesbian Review

MAKING ART is difficult. Doing it when you’re struggling with an illness you know is going to kill you is a higher level of achievement. “How do I embrace this thing and make it OK, or make myself able to live with it and produce and go on from there? How do I live every day with despair?” wrote painter Hugh Auchincloss Steers after he was diagnosed with HIV at age 25. The answer was: by constantly painting canvases depicting men who are ill, men in partial or complete undress, ambiguously intimate in their private spaces. Steers did this for the remaining seven years of his life, almost up to the day he died: March 1, 1995.

The raw force and beauty of Steers’ figurative painting is on display in a solo exhibition of work not shown previously, at Alexander Gray Associates through July 27th. The Chelsea gallery, which represents the artist’s estate, last exhibited Steers’ work in 2015. In fall 2017, two of the artist’s works were included in AIDS at Home: Art and Everyday Activism, an exhibit at the Museum of the City of New York. In 2015, Visual AIDS, a New York-based organization dedicated to HIV/AIDS awareness through visual art projects, published Hugh Steers: The Complete Paintings, 1983–1994, a comprehensive look at Steers’ work with accompanying essays, including author Cynthia Carr’s profile of the artist.

Hugh Auchincloss Steers, Bath Curtain, 1992

Carr discusses Steers’ artistic influences as well as the complexity of his personal history and the troubled relationships he had with his family despite his glamorous WASP pedigree. As a gay man at Hotchkiss, an exclusive boarding school in Connecticut, Steers felt alienated. The friendships he made there were mostly with women who also felt as though they were on the outside looking in. One new classmate came to Hotchkiss from a school in Madrid. On her first day, she followed the custom of not bringing books into the dining room. Seeing this, Steers went over to her and said, “You dropped your books with such panache. I have to meet you.” Carr reports they became best friends.

Born in Washington, D.C., to Nina Gore Auchincloss and Newton Steers, a mutual funds entrepreneur and later a U.S. Congressman from Maryland, Steers grew up in the affluent suburban enclave of Bethesda, Maryland. He was a graduate of Hotchkiss and Yale, the grandson of financier Hugh D. Auchincloss, who owned Hammersmith Farm in Newport and who was also the stepfather of Jackie Kennedy (Steers and JFK Jr. played together in Newport in the summer), a descendant of statesman Aaron Burr, and the nephew of American author Gore Vidal. In ways similar to Vidal, he considered all of this to be a very mixed blessing. He sought to make his way as a painter largely independently of his social connections. This extended to numerous periods in his short artistic career as he struggled to pay the rent on his rundown apartments that doubled as studios.

At first glance, a Steers painting is a tipoff that all is not right in the world. AIDS is often lurking, but to suggest that his paintings are solely about his own illness—a death sentence for thousands of mostly gay and bisexual men in this period—is to miss their broader significance. At the same time seeing them strictly through a political lens is equally reductive. If anything, as figurative paintings, they were anomalous if not retrograde at a time—the 1980s and ’90s—when the fashion was more toward conceptual and performance art, or photography, as illustrated by the popularity of Robert Mapplethorpe. Steers was attuned to the art that was in vogue, but he was doggedly committed to representational art and to depicting the male figure in a centuries-old tradition of the great masters, such as Caravaggio, Velázquez, and Goya (whose influence is evident in his work), and of more recent artists like Edward Hopper and David Park. In a 1992 interview, Steers commented on the mood in his paintings: “I think I’m in the tradition of a certain kind of American artist—artists whose work embodies a certain gorgeous bleakness.”

One of the bitter ironies of the AIDS epidemic is that it began at the end of the very decade, the 1970s, when gay men had created a community for the first time, and on a large scale. Gay liberation, though its roots ran farther back, essentially came out of the radical politics and cultural usurpations of the previous decade. It flowered with Stonewall and in the fervor of gay pride celebrations on Castro Street, in the Village, and in other large urban centers. Gay publications such as The Bladein Washington, The Advocate, which originated in Los Angeles, and San Francisco’s Gay Sunshineemerged to meet the interests of a growing audience. A new, openly gay literature arose with books by young writers, such as Andrew Holleran’s Dancer from the Danceand Edmund White’s Nocturnes for the King of Naples.

Tribalism had been an element of hippie sit-ins and be-ins and other gatherings in the ’60s. Parks were filled with young men and women dancing to guitars and drums, the air thick with incense and marijuana smoke. A little later, hordes of shirtless gay and bisexual men would lose themselves in the crowd at all-night discos or flock to the beaches at Fire Island for entire weekends. Steers’ work, with its allegorical references—some of the figures wear paper bags over their heads; black cats and crows enter these spaces—is a reminder of how drastically things would change. AIDS was sending men back into isolation and darkness. The tribe was splintering. Does so-and-so have “it”? Could I catch it from him? These were questions that people, both gay and straight, were asking themselves in the early years of the epidemic.

The mood in Steers’ paintings, which usually involve two men in relation to one another, is antithetical to the crowd euphoria of the pre-AIDS period. A Steers painting isn’t about “us”; it’s more about “you and I.” Nor is it about the anonymity of the baths or the music- and drug-induced highs of the bars. These men are fenced in, their lives intersect; they are consigned to one another. They are lovers, or have been; or per- haps they were acquaintances brought together because, as a result of being sick, they were going broke. In many cases they appear to be dying. They inhabit a multi-layered emotional zone very different from that of the packed dance floors or the sun-drenched beaches of a few years before.

The paintings draw the viewer into a private space: a bare room with a bed, or a bathroom with a tub, sometimes the old-fashioned clawfoot style, a symbol of luxury in the Victorian era. In many American cities you can still find them: in gritty, unrenovated apartment buildings, like the ones Steers lived and worked in, tubs left over from the early 20th century when the buildings were constructed. In Steers’ paintings, the “claws” can seem animated and menacing.

In Bath Curtain(1992), for example, a man in white underwear sits on a toilet, his back arched toward the bathtub. His wrists are thin in contrast to his thick, muscular torso. He is holding the hand of the man who lies in the bath, his face shrouded by a white shower curtain, his arms and one shoulder visible. The large (64- by 72-inch) painting’s composition divides the space diagonally so that the figure of the seated man pushes left into the viewer’s space, echoing Pierre Bonnard’s many great “bath” paintings that divide or flatten the plane, such as Large Nude in the Bathtubfrom 1924. But while Bonnard’s figures often have a kind of muted emotionality, Bath Curtainis infused with a tenderness wrung out of suffering. The love between the seemingly healthier seated man and the leaner one bathing is palpable.

The influence of Bonnard can also be seen in Steers’ color palette, in the intermixing and soft suffusion of pale yellow, green, and violet tones on the windowsill, tub, and tiled floor. Yet there is a key difference. Bonnard’s female figures blend in with the walls and the other objects in the picture, as seen in Large Nude, while in Steers’ Bath Curtain, the harsh, hot, orange-red and brown flesh tones of the bent figure’s back are in opposition to the low-key colors of the surroundings. George Bellows’ boxing pictures come to mind, and also the use of a vibrant red for skin tones by Marsden Hartley, as in his Christ Held by Half-Naked Men(1940–41), a painting that also has a strong thematic connection to Steers’ Bath Curtain.

Steers said this about his work: “A lot of my art has to do with that primal idea of drawing a painting of the hunt on the side of the cave. … It’s like a conjuring. I would like to be able to act or have someone care about me the way some of the people in my paintings act or care about each other. It’s as if painting it will make it become real.”

Although the figures in his paintings are sick and vulnerable, they are imbued with a physicality, an erotic fire. AIDS is ruining their bodies and impairing their mental faculties, yet despite this loss of power, there is defiance, affirmation—even a sexual affirmation. You can see it in numerous paintings in which a figure is wearing high heels. Steers had an interest in drag from a young age and used it symbolically as an antidote to defeat. An earlier oil on cardboard, Title unknown(ca. 1985), shows two pairs of bright red stilettos side by side. In one, a ripe pear appears in the foreground; in the other, the heel point of one of the shoes is stuck in a jar of Vaseline. Steers wrote: “Shoes like that are an amazing thing. They are so structured and there’s an architectural quality to them. They’re culture run wild, and yet they’re linked to a very sexual quality.”

Even in the late 1980s, the trappings of transvestism were not always met with open arms, whether in the gay world or the straight world. In 1994, the year before Steers died, he commented to art critic Holland Cotter that the commercial gallery that had been showing his work in the ’80s was finding his more recent “I’m-gonna-wear-heels-and-fuck-you” attitude less acceptable. Steers subsequently began exhibiting with maverick gallerist Richard Anderson, who risked showing up-and-coming artists and was more receptive to the way that Steers’ no-holds-barred work was evolving.

In Man and IV(1994), another large (65- by 47-inch) canvas, a tall, thin man wearing a white hospital gown that comes up well above his knees stands in white stilettos, hands on his hips, an IV attached to his forearm. He stares down the viewer in such a way as to say something like, “Yeah, I’m sick, and it sucks. But I’m not done.” Gender studies professor James Smalls, in one of the essays in the Visual AIDS monograph on his œuvre, mentions that Steers saw the figure in this painting, part of the artist’s “Hospital Man” series, as “a superhero fighting for the sexual rights of the sick.”

At the end of his life, despite many friendships with both sexes, and having had intimacies with men who might be described as lovers, Steers regretted that he had never had a “romantic” relationship. He was also quoted as saying that he never felt at home in the world, so it wasn’t that hard to leave. As a possible explanation, Carr mentions a line from Uncle Gore’s Palimpsest: “None of us brought up in a world of such crude publicness tends to trust much of anyone, while those who mean to prevail soon learn the art of distancing the self from dangerous involvements.”

What Steers did trust was painting. “There’s nothing like an exceptionally good passage of paint to make me feel good,” he said. When he died, his ashes were divided, with some scattered at Newport, another portion in Narragansett Bay. The remaining ashes were placed, along with his brushes and paints, inside his painter’s box, which was buried in the Auchincloss plot at the cemetery.

Martin Wong on the Lower East Side

WHEN, IN AN INTERVIEW, curator and art chronicler Yasmin Ramirez asked American painter Martin Wong why he left his native San Francisco in 1978 and moved to New York, Wong said he went there “just to visit and then I ended up almost immediately living there.” Aligning himself with black and Latino graffiti artists and poets on the Lower East Side, including the legendary Puerto Rican writer and ex-con Miguel Piñero, his friend and sometime lover, Wong nevertheless described himself as a “tourist” there. If indeed he felt like an outsider—and Wong, Asian and gay, could certainly look like one, flamboyantly dressed, as he often was, from head to toe, like an urban cowboy—as an artist he penetrated deeply into the social terrain that he was observing.

It was in New York—city of darkness in contrast to San Francisco, city of the golden sun and the azure sky—that Wong found himself in the late 1970s, and it is where he created his most important works. It was as if New York’s underside seemed more real to Wong than the phantasmagoric, hallucinatory world of San Francisco in the Counterculture years, even though that city had emerged as the epicenter of (largely white) gay cultural life.

Wong died of AIDS-related causes in 1999, and the memory of his extraordinary output over a short span of about two decades in the ’80s and ’90s has begun to fade in recent years. This situation has been partly corrected by the comprehensive show mounted this past winter, Martin Wong: Human Instamatic, jointly organized by Ramirez and curator–poetry scholar Sergio Bessa (he also edited the superb catalog), at the Bronx Museum of the Arts. (The exhibit continues at the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, from May 14 through August 7, 2016; and moves to the U.C.-Berkeley Art Museum September 12 through December 10, 2017.)

Much of Wong’s most noteworthy art addresses, with anthropological acumen and a vivid fantasism, Latino and black life in the 1980s on the decaying Lower East Side—“the Loisaida”—as well as life behind bars, the inevitable adjunct for many of the people who lived there. Wong depicts the bleakness of pre-gentrified Loisaida, but he also locates aspects of its vibrancy and beauty, whether it’s a couple holding one another in the rubble of a vacant lot (Sharp & Dottie, 1984) or two firemen kissing in front of what looks like a deserted brick building in 1988’s Big Heat. (As a boy in San Francisco’s Chinatown, Wong was never as happy as when standing on a fire truck. Firemen appear often in his work, such as in his 1988 text painting, I Really Like the Way Firemen Smell, and My Fire Guy, also 1988, which shows a fully uniformed fireman in bed tenderly cradling a puppy.)

Wong’s life can be conveniently divided into two parts, his early life on the West Coast and his life in the East. He came from a middle-class Chinese-American family, a doted-upon only child growing up in relative comfort in the 1950s and ’60s. He enjoyed collecting, along with his mother, artsy tchotchkes and Asian artifacts, showed a talent for drawing the human figure (his early self-portraits in this exhibit demonstrate a stunning ability), and studied ceramics at Humboldt State University in Eureka. He returned to San Francisco from Eureka for a period in the early 70s and became an artist activist, providing materials for the gender-bending, communal-oriented Angels of Light, an offshoot of the Cockettes.

With his move to the East, an altogether new life began. Wong was in his early thirties when he traveled to New York, where he stumbled upon the run-down Meyer’s Hotel at South Street Seaport, which is where he would live and paint for three years, refining his representational painting techniques, largely unknown to the outside world. It is there that he painted My Secret World (1978-81, 1984), a work that would prove seminal to his vast output in the 1980s, illustrating as it does many of his artistic concerns. When Ramirez asked him in that same interview in 1996—the transcript of which is included in the catalogue—what would characterize “classic Martin Wong themes,” the artist answered: “Bricks and jails.”

With its pollution-dimmed brick façades and chiseled inscriptions, My Secret World offers a sort of voyeuristic view, through two large openings that aren’t quite windows, into the artist’s room at the Meyer’s Hotel. It is a small room with a tidily made bed and a simple dresser. Parts of several of the artist’s earlier paintings can be seen on the wall: one shows a large eight-ball, another a pair of dice. A third painting, from 1980, titled Psychiatrists Testify: Demon Dogs Drive Man to Murder (the last two words aren’t visible), refers to the New York serial killer Son of Sam. It consists of American Sign Language hand gestures that spell out the title. Books atop the dresser include Picturebook of Freaks, Famous Disasters, How to Make Money, Magic, Flying Saucers, Pirate Stories, and Unbeatable Bruce Lee.

In his catalog essay, poet and critic John Yau points out that “Wong’s images of bad luck and good luck are part of his worldview, along with his interest in different kinds of language, from the aural hallucinations of the insane to the hand signals of ASL.” The books that he puts on display attest to his male hero worship and interest in male adventure, a desire to make both art and money (a common conflict for many artists), his Asian identity, and his inward sense of alienation.

Wong’s aim as a painter was far more than just to act as a documentarian; otherwise, photography would have suited his purposes. His use of paint, particularly in his ubiquitous portrayal of brick walls and buildings—layering up earthy browns, burnt sienna, and ochers in a richly textured, sensuous way—is an æsthetic nod not only to his own experience making art from clay but also to the history of modernism, with its emphasis on paint as a tactile medium, the importance of color dynamics on the surface of the canvas, and the many uses of abstraction. Beyond that, one can see influences as disparate as R. Crumb, the countercultural cartoonist of “Mr. Natural” fame in the ’60s; Fernando Botero, the great Colombian painter of bulbous human figures; and Mondrian, with his commitment to geometric shape and balance (Wong owned a Mondrian drawing).

One recurrent element in numerous Wong paintings, the spelling out of titles through American Sign Language—which he began doing in 1980 with Psychiatrists Testify—can come off as slightly gimmicky, especially in paintings in which the ASL gestures are dominant. Fisted hands that resemble gnomic people, they can be a distraction, introducing the framework of a visual language that feels out of place. It’s as though Wong were trying too hard to be cryptic; or that somehow his realism isn’t enough in an art world that demands irony, sophistication, and double meanings. On the other hand, signs and symbols often do work for Wong, as in Tell My Troubles to the Eight Ball, that symbol of random answers, and in the exquisite Chinese Altar Screen, with its echoes of Duchamp, Rauschenberg, and Magritte.

A pivotal event in Wong’s life was meeting Piñero in 1981, at ABC No Rio, the alternative arts center on the Lower East Side, where Wong was exhibiting his work. In and out of prison for theft and drug possession, Piñero, who co-founded Nuyorican Poets Café, is best known for his play-turned-film Short Eyes, which describes the intricate power relationships and rituals of degradation in prison society. Piñero told Wong prison stories and revealed a world unknown to the artist. Wong tells Ramirez that “when Piñero was here I would just meet all of these beautiful gangsters. Yeah for awhile I lived with Piñero, and for awhile I lived with [graffiti artist] Lee Quinones and both times I guess it was like living with a Puerto Rican movie star or an ex-movie star.”

It is evident throughout his body of work that Wong was a painter with a keen understanding of art history, not just in the 20th century, but going back to the Renaissance and earlier. It’s interesting that Wong made his first sale of a major work in 1984 to that great temple of art antiquities, the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The painting was titled Attorney Street(Handball Court with Autobiographical Poemby Miguel Piñero). Wong also worked at the Met’s bookstore for a time in the late 1980s.

An icon of the Western canon, the Annunciation has been painted by El Greco, Caravaggio, Fra Angelico, and countless other artists. In Wong’s version, 1984’s The Annunciation According to Mikey Piñero (Cupcake and Paco), a man dressed in a white prison uniform kneels before a shirtless and muscular inmate. The painting has overtones of an attempted seduction, without any sense of coercion. Looking at the painting, one can imagine that the man who’s kneeling is trying to convince the other man, who seems ambivalent, to give it a try. One could imagine him saying something like, “I know you’re straight, but we’re in this place and somehow we have to survive.” The title’s reference to the Annunciation could be interpreted as purely ironic, but that would be too reductive. In a prison world where one may not always get to choose one’s sexual partner, same-sex love represents a more humane possibility, rare as it may be, to create a genuine human bond.

After he was diagnosed with AIDS, Wong left New York and returned to San Francisco to spend his last few years living with his parents. Growing in his mother’s small back yard, amid a handful of his early ceramic pieces, were succulents and cacti, exotic plants with origins in another part of the world that could nonetheless thrive in this alien coastal climate. Painted in stark black and white in 1997-98, Euphorbia Obesa and Mammillaria Wildii Crest, for example, contain orb-like forms, striated and furrowed, that call to mind close-ups of the brain. Considering the artist’s courage and brilliance, and the disease that was slowly killing him, it seems fitting that they are among Wong’s final paintings.

James Cassell, an artist and writer, lives in Silver Spring, MD. His last show was in 2014 at Studio 21 Gallery in Washington, DC.

At the Heart of a Bay Area Revival

An Opening of the Field: Jess, Robert Duncan, and Their Circle Curated by Michael Duncan and Christopher Wagstaff At the Pasadena Museum of California Art to January 11, 2015

ART HISTORY can be a dry affair: a reinterpretation for the umpteenth time of the Mona Lisa’s smile. But sometimes it can bring to light an undervalued artist or an overlooked cultural moment. An example of the latter is an exhibition titled An Opening of the Field: Jess, Robert Duncan, and Their Circle, whose importance extends beyond the San Francisco Bay Area and American cultural history to encompass GLBT history as well. The show’s title refers to Robert Duncan’s 1960 volume of poetry, The Opening of the Field, whose cover sported an illustration by his partner Jess. The word “field,” argues co-curator Christopher Wagstaff, is “a metaphor for the cosmos or an expanding state of awareness.” After runs at New York University and American University in Washington, D.C., the show has now arrived in southern California.

Although a few of the mid-century Bay Area artists represented here are somewhat well-known, the majority are hardly household names. Among them are Helen Adam, George Herms, Edward Corbett, Eloise Mixon, Philip Roeber, Ronald Bladen, Harry Jacobus, and Virginia Admiral (known mainly as actor Robert DeNiro’s mother). The show illustrates and gives coherence to their common bonds, providing, perhaps for the first time, an understanding of their ideas and influences. But it primarily brings to the fore the two men at the center of this mid-20th-century cross-fertilization for whom life and art were inseparable.

Jess started life as Burgess Franklin Collins, a nerdy if handsome introvert, the product of a conservative family. A chemist, he fulfilled his service during World War II by helping to produce plutonium for the Manhattan project. “When they dropped the bomb I knew science was made by black magicians,” he later said. This theme, society’s idolization of scientific advances at the cost of spiritual awareness, persists throughout his work. In the late 1940s, Jess had a dream about the coming annihilation of the world. Shortly thereafter, he left science, severed ties with his family, moved to San Francisco, became simply “Jess,” and began to study art. A heavily wax-crayoned work on paper from 1959 shows his continued fascination with mass destruction. The darkened back of a man is seen against a vivid sky, his right arm pointing to a fiery mushroom-like column of light in the upper right. The sun is lower left and off-center. The thickly textured piece, echoing Van Gogh in its style and Albert Pinkham Ryder in its allegorical content, is titled Qui Auget Scientiam Auget Dolorem (“Who Increases Science Increases Grief”).

Robert Duncan, the more outgoing of the two, was the adopted child of Theosophists. His parents believed their gifted son had lived in Atlantis in a past life, and they encouraged his early interest in the arts, literature, and philosophy. While both were Californians—they met in San Francisco in the summer of 1950—Jess and Duncan’s backgrounds could not have been more dissimilar. And yet, despite Duncan’s absences due to teaching assignments and lecture circuit tours and Jess’s preference for staying at home and working, in their 37 years together (ending at Duncan’s death in 1988), they complemented and supported one another creatively. They were a model for many friends—straight, gay, and otherwise—of how to be in a committed relationship.

Jess: The Enamord Mage: Translation #6, a portrait of Robert Duncan, 1965

In the 1940s, before settling in San Francisco, Duncan had traveled abroad and spent a few years in New York. In a film shown in the exhibit, Duncan describes how he tried unsuccessfully to find employment there. Not wishing to hide his homosexuality, he was denied jobs because of it, or, on the other hand, was offered employment because of it. In the end, he preferred to wash dishes. While sexual freedom was certainly not a fact of everyday life in the Bay Area in the postwar years, the atmosphere in San Francisco, compared to the rest of America, was somewhat more conducive to “doing your own thing.”

At the entrance to the exhibit, a short documentary film takes the viewer inside the house that Jess and Duncan shared in San Francisco’s Mission District. It was a world unto itself, filled with books and art, including Jess’s paintings and collages (or “paste-ups” as he called them) and Duncan’s large, wax-crayon-on-paper drawings. Also on the walls were works by friends including: Wallace Berman, best known for his complex photo collages; Edward Corbett, a great and under-appreciated West Coast abstractionist; the eccentric poet and collagist Helen Adam; George Herms, who created startling mixed-media assemblages from found debris; and R. B. Kitaj, an anomalous figurative artist who drew on influences as disparate as Ezra Pound, James Joyce, and Jewish history and culture. Some of the works were gifts or were traded for another’s work. The commercial sale of art was not part of this crowd’s vocabulary.

In mid-century America, the focus was largely on East Coast artists, notably the abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko. Although touted as the first flowering of an authentically American art movement, abstract expressionism had multiple roots in Europe. Inherent in it was a rather doctrinaire view of art history. It sought to cleanse the canvas of all narrative information, such as any figurative components. The painting was to be distilled down to its purest elements of color and line. In contrast, artists on the West Coast were less confined by orthodoxies. To be sure, the West had its share of great abstract expressionists—Clyfford Still, another of Jess’s teachers at CSFA, being the best known. But Still was tolerant of artists who deviated from pure abstraction in their work, as did the circle around Jess and Duncan, who borrowed from a diversity of sources.

While two-dimensional works comprise most of An Opening of the Field, the show also includes stone sculptures, assemblages, Duncan’s handmade books of poems, and a 37-minute film by filmmaker–poet James Broughton. “The Pleasure Garden,” both satire and allegory aimed at societal repression, perfectly sets the stage for the exhibit. Made in 1953 and shot in London’s Crystal Palace Gardens, Broughton’s Chaplinesque short film follows several eccentrics as they cavort in an Edenic setting in which their nemeses, Col. Pall K. Gargoyle and Aunt Minerva, attempt to rein in any kind of physical or emotional expression. In the end, the two moralizers are expelled from the garden and the inhabitants can again pursue their desires.

The art of Jess, Robert Duncan, and many of those affiliated with them was infused with Romanticism and myth. Writes Christopher Wagstaff: “myth for these two artists involves the disclosure in time of what is primordial and time-free.” Dreams, too—as well as a belief in the transformative importance of the imagination and the idea that art can involve joyful play—characterize their works. For them, art and life were interchangeable: a canvas, a drawing, a poem was not so much a thing confined by its finishedness as something alive and ongoing. In a statement regarding his æsthetics, Duncan asks, “Why should one’s art then be an achievement? Why not more an adventure?”

Of the two, I think Jess was the stronger and more original painter. But then, Duncan was first and foremost a poet. (A complete collection of his poems is to be published soon.) Duncan’s writings, with their allusions to dreams, mythologies and fairy tales, clearly informed much of Jess’s work. The two often collaborated, with Jess providing the visual elements for Duncan’s poetry, such as Jess’s ink-on-paper illustration for his 1955 poem “The Song of the Borderguard.” With its spare lines and monochromatic blacks and whites perfectly balancing one another, it recalls the work of the late-19th-century artist Aubrey Beardsley and art nouveau.

Jess’s relationship with Duncan also contributed to Jess’s use of sexual imagery. His A Thin Veneer of Civility(Self-Portrait), an oil wash on canvas from 1954, is in its soft beauty among the show’s most striking and powerful works. From a distance, the nude, boney male figure in the long vertical canvas—its predominant colors muted browns, yellow, and a warm red—appears to be leaning back and… what? Urinating? Masturbating? On closer viewing, we see that he is actually using a ball of string to play with a cat that’s turned over on its back at his feet. Above in the upper right is a faint image of his lover Duncan’s head. “Tender, tongue-in-cheek, and pointedly sexual, the painting blithely breaks nearly every taboo of its time,” remarks Michael Duncan in the superb exhibit book.

Jess said that a dream is the perfect collage, the elements artlessly and seamlessly fitting together, conveying the dream’s own logic. His “paste-ups” present what is undoubtedly a dreamlike world. Filtered through a Freudian prism on the interior psyche, collage has its roots in Cubism, evolving and flourishing under Dada and Surrealism, as seen in works by earlier 20th-century artists such as Kurt Schwitters and Max Ernst (to whom Jess acknowledged a debt). It is arguably the most narrative of all modern art forms. Like a novelist, the collagist has a story to tell. But the process, rather than being preconceived, is somewhat serendipitous. The collage elements—magazine cut-outs, pieces of fabric, found objects—are often haphazardly assembled, products of the mind’s conscious and unconscious riffing off visual juxtapositions and puns.

Through collage, Jess, as a gay man and a misfit in 1950s America, was able to express his alienation, anger, anxieties, and homosexual longings. He used contemporary advertising materials and text—for example, ads for shaving cream and sportswear. He found, and sometimes made explicit, the underlying homoerotic elements of this imagery. In some collages, handsome, muscular and unclothed men appear in sexual positions. He used satire and humor fearlessly, poking fun at himself and his own urges. Defying convention, he could bend hetero-oriented material into homoerotic juxtapositions, exacting a kind of revenge upon the dominant culture that had rendered invisible his preferred mode of erotic expression.

James Cassell, an artist and writer, lives in Silver Spring, MD. His work was recently seen at the Studio 21 Gallery in Washington, DC.